The distributed program reliability analysis on star topologies

A distributed computing system consists of processing elements, communication links, memory units, data files, and programs. These resources are interconnected via a communication network and controlled by a distributed operating system. The distributed program reliability in a distributed computing system is the probability that a program which runs on multiple processing elements and needs to retrieve data files from other processing elements will be executed successfully. This reliability varies according to (1) the topology of the distributed computing system, (2) the reliability of the communication edges, (3) the data files and programs distribution among processing elements, and (4) the data files required to execute a program. In this paper, we show that computing the distributed program reliability on the star distributed computing systems is NP-hard. We also develop an efficiently solvable case to compute distributed program reliability when some additional file distribution is restricted on the star topology.